Thoughts on social media, marketing & communications.

Monthly Archives: August 2012

Last night Pinterest started sending emails to alert a user when someone who FOLLOWS them on Twitter, joined Pinterest.

Pinterest, like Twitter, use a asynchronous follow model. I can follow someone on either network, and they don’t have to follow me back. If you have a public Twitter account, anyone in the world can follow you, but Pinterest is defining that relationship to indicate that those who follow you on Twitter are your “friends”.

On one level, I think this is useful. It is nice to know when someone who took the time to follow you on Twitter joins Pinterest, but Pinterest defining this as a “friend”, may be overreaching.

Additionally, for Twitter accounts that have a large number of followers it can be problematic with a large number of email alerts.

Example from my gmail inbox

After I posted about this change on Twitter last night, a social media manager from a large news/media organization tweeted to me that they certainly noticed the change with their Twitter created Pinterest account and over one million followers on Twitter.

While Pinterest offers a way to turn off these emails in the control panel, this media organization had to disconnect their Twitter account from Pinterest to make the emails stop. They turned off all the notification options, but the emails kept coming. This is likely an error on the Pinterest side of things that they will hopefully be able to resolve quickly.